Captain Lee Rosbach Details How He Injured Himself at the Start of Below Deck Season 8

Captain Lee Rosbach was nowhere to be found on the yacht as bosun Eddie Lucas was the first to report for duty in the Season 8 premiere of Below Deck. A phone call to Captain Lee revealed that the Below Deck boss was in the hospital after falling in the shower and injuring his ribs.

Captain Lee shared during an interview with The Daily Dish on November 4 he injured himself that morning the crew was supposed to arrive for the charter season. "I was getting out of the shower, and I don’t know why they gave me this little postage stamp of a bathmat to step onto when I get out of the shower. And the door doesn’t open out, it opens in. So you have to kind of stand off to the side in order to get out of the shower, and then the sink’s right here on your right," Captain Lee recalled. "I should have put a towel down or something because it’s marble floors, and marble on water gets really slippery. And I just slipped and fell into the sink."

Though something like this could have happened to anyone, Captain Lee said that he "felt really stupid" at the time. "Probably not nearly as dumb as I looked though," he added.

With the crew set to arrive shortly and a whole charter season about to get underway, Captain Lee recalled thinking to himself, "I don’t believe this. I so screwed this up."

Captain Lee said that after assessing the damage, he concluded that he was in need of medical attention. "I flopped in my bunk and just laid down for a few minutes, and it’s when I tried to get back up again that I thought, 'OK, this is worse than I figured,'" Captain Lee remembered. "So I called somebody from production, I said, 'I’m gonna have to get this checked out,' 'cause if I broke a rib, and I did it in the wrong way, I could end up puncturing a lung or something like that."

Luckily, Captain Lee didn't break anything, and he didn't damage any vital organs, he shared upon his return to the yacht in the Below Deck Season 8 premiere, although he he told The Daily Dish that he was left with "a bruise on my side about the size of a football." 

As for the pain, "it only hurt when I moved or breathed," Captain Lee joked. "It’s constant and then worse. Very sharp stabbing," Captain Lee described, adding that yawning and laughing were especially painful. "Laughter, don’t even get me started with that," he said. "If somebody’d say something funny, you just had to like stifle it back. You couldn’t, ‘cause it’d just bring tears to your eyes."

One of the moments Captain Lee had to hold back that laughter was when the doctors suggested he go on bed rest upon returning to the yacht. "As much as it hurt, I just started laughing," Captain Lee recalled. "I said, 'You have no clue, do you?'"

Captain Lee said that he just had to "grind it out" while being injured this charter season, although there were times when he needed a little help from his crew. "A couple of times I had to have somebody come in and help me sit up in bed just so I could get up," he said. "It was either that or roll over until I fell out of bed, 'cause I couldn’t physically sit up."

However, Captain Lee said that there was no other option but to push through for the sake of the crew and the charter guests this season. "I didn’t hesitate. We were gonna get this season in, and I was gonna be there, whatever it took," he said. "You can’t expect your crew to stand and deliver if you’re not willing to do the same thing. So if I’m telling them to suck it up, I damn sure better be ready to do the same thing myself."

Want more Below Deck? New episodes air every Monday at 9/8c or catch up on this season through the Bravo app.

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